Selfridges brings nature to Oxford Street during lockdown
Featuring Marco Kesseler’s evocative Polytunnel series, ‘A Return to Nature’ brings a natural high to London's eerily quiet shopping district
![Marco Kesseler's series, Polytunnel.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/aXgdMBPCixVqoCtCon5yMJ-415-80.jpg)
While galleries remain closed, and the streets of London remain hushed and subdued, a photography exhibition is breathing new life into the city’s retail heart. ‘A Return to Nature’ is a joint outdoor show by photographers Marco Kesseler and Cameron Bensley and is displayed across Selfridges’ flagship store windows.
The exhibition celebrates the beauty and fragility of the natural world, our relationship with it, and sparks a dialogue around the impacts of climate change.
The work of British photographer Marco Kesseler is deeply entwined with social engagement. His series Polytunnel delves into the concealed landscape of agricultural food production spaces and creates tensions between chaos and control; artificial and environmental.
Shot in locations such as Devon and the Midlands, Kessler the series charts the different stages of the agricultural calendar, documenting the cycle of planting, growing, harvesting and lying fallow. Here, plastic polytunnels and the tightly-controlled cultivation process within are juxtaposed with unruly natural surroundings. In these ethereal images, which zoom in on the peripheral elements of agricultural production, nature ruptures the plastic shrouds and establishes itself in structural cracks - allegories of environmental resilience against harmful human interventions.
On Selfridges’ Orchard and Duke Street windows, London-based Cameron Bensley confronts both the potent power of the global natural world and its fragility under the grips of global warming. Bensley, who also works as an in-house fashion photographer at Selfridges, took to imposing natural landscapes under threat, such glaciers shielded by thermal sheeting.
‘A Return to Nature’ is both a celebration of the natural world and a plea for its conservation. The exhibition – which is also available to view online – offers city dwellers a chance to embrace the great outdoors while the city’s busiest street remains fallow.
Polytunnel
Installation
INFORMATION
‘A Return to Nature’ will be on view online and in the windows of Selfridges, London until the store reopens. selfridges.com
ADDRESS
Wallpaper* Newsletter + Free Download
For a free digital copy of August Wallpaper*, celebrating Creative America, sign up today to receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories
400 Oxford St
London W1A 1AB
Harriet Lloyd-Smith was the Arts Editor of Wallpaper*, responsible for the art pages across digital and print, including profiles, exhibition reviews, and contemporary art collaborations. She started at Wallpaper* in 2017 and has written for leading contemporary art publications, auction houses and arts charities, and lectured on review writing and art journalism. When she’s not writing about art, she’s making her own.
-
‘Hedonistic and avant-garde’: Rabanne’s Julian Dossena on the legacy of the chainmail 1969 bag
Paco Rabanne’s 1969 chainmail handbag encapsulates the late designer’s futuristic, space-age style. Current creative director Julien Dossena tells Wallpaper* about the bag’s particular pleasures
By Jack Moss Published
-
Postcard from Paris: Olympic fever takes over the streets
On the eve of the opening ceremony of Paris 2024, our correspondent shares her views from the streets of the capital about how the event is impacting the urban landscape.
By Minako Norimatsu Published
-
The Mercury Prize nominees for 2024 have been revealed
Charli XCX, The Last Dinner Party and Beth Gibbons are amongst this year's nominees
By Charlotte Gunn Published
-
‘Mental health, motherhood and class’: Hannah Perry’s dynamic installation at Baltic
Hannah Perry's exhibition ’Manual Labour’ is on show at Baltic in Gateshead, UK, a five-part installation drawing parallels between motherhood and factory work
By Emily Steer Published
-
Francis Alÿs plots child play around the world at the Barbican
In Francis Alÿs' exhibition ‘Ricochets’ at London’s Barbican, the artist explores the universality of play, even in challenging situations
By Amah-Rose Abrams Published
-
‘I am almost an anti-sculptor’: Dominique White on her Whitechapel Max Mara Art Prize show
The artist mines the ocean to explore Afrofuturism in ‘Deadweight’, opening at London’s Whitechapel and detailed in a new film
By Amah-Rose Abrams Published
-
Suzannah Pettigrew's 'tender and ghostly' new show at Surrealist photographer Lee Miller's former home in East Sussex
London-based artist Suzannah Pettigrew's photographic stills create a snapshot of her Sussex coast childhood, conjuring up a hallucinatory world of memory
By Mary Cleary Published
-
The body, pleasure and play: Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland united in London
Tom of Finland’s homoeroticism meets Beryl Cook’s female-oriented camp as Studio Voltaire unites work by the two artists in a London exhibition
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Zanele Muholi celebrates South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in LA and London
Zanele Muholi's portraits and sculptures are currently on show at Southern Guild Los Angeles and the Tate Modern, London
By Hannah Silver Published
-
‘Judy Chicago: Revelations’ brings the feminist trailblazer’s unseen works to London
Judy Chicago presents a major retrospective at Serpentine North, including unseen works from a boat-rocking career that spearheaded the feminist art movement (until 1 September 2024)
By Tianna Williams Published
-
Don’t miss: Hayv Kahraman intertwines colonialism and botany in London
Artist Hayv Kahraman draws parallels between colonial botany and her experiences as an Iraqi refugee transplanted into Europe, at Pilar Corrias in London
By Hannah Silver Published